Nick Clegg gives an extra £400 to disadvantaged kids so why is this turning into a story about ranking pupils

You have to feel for Nick Clegg. He's doing the media rounds this morning with some really good news. Primary schools are going to get an extra £400 in Pupil Premium, bringing the total per child per year to £1300. Impressive, surely?

It makes sense that the money is directed so that if a child is struggling in primary school, they get the help that they need then. Early intervention has to be the name of the game. The last thing you would ever want is for them to go from a primary school of a few hundred kids, in a smallish, stable class to go to a much bigger environment, to study a wider range of subjects, if they are not able to read, write or do basic numeracy. They are clearly going to be at a huge disadvantage in that diverse and fast moving environment if they haven't got these basic skills. They are likely to go backwards from that point.

The extra money comes with conditions for the schools to meet. I know I come from Scotland where we have a different education system, but it stunned me to hear that it was deemed as ok for 4 out of 10 children to leave primary school without these basic skills. Intervention measures would only be taken if a school had fewer than 60% of its pupils not meeting that standard - and the Labour Party were fine with that. That was not something Nick Clegg was prepared to accept.

Nick is now saying that he wants 85% of pupils to be able to read, write and use numbers before they go to secondary school. That is a huge leap in performance. It's a necessary challenge for schools. There will be a second measure taken, too, of the progress that each child has made in primary school. It stands to reason that you then have to assess kids at an early age and then again as they are about to leave primary school. I had initially misunderstood and thought that they were going to pile a huge load of extra, external tests on 5 and 11 year olds, but that's not the case at all. Only if a school fails to meet the 85% AND fails to show that the children are progressing will they be put on special measures.

Children are assessed, generally without their knowledge, when they first go to school anyway. I remember going for my daughter's first parents' evening and being given huge amounts of detail about her that the teachers had gleaned in an entirely unstressful way. Similarly, good tracking and monitoring enabled the school to give us a detailed report of her abilities when she finished primary school. What's different up here is that the assessment process has child input into it. They are expected to say, on a traffic light system, how they feel they are doing in each subject, as well as a report from the teacher. I felt that that report was much more informative and useful because it helped me guage how confident my daughter felt about what she was doing.

At the moment, parents are told which level their child has achieved when they leave primary school. All that's being suggested in the consultation is that they should be told where their child is compared to others across the country. It's not as if this information is going to be made public - it's shared between school and parent, nobody else. It helps to make sure that standards are being applied consistently across the country. It is, however, not an intrinsic part of the policy of driving up standards and giving the extra money. If parents didn't like the idea, I'm fairly certain the ranking could be quietly ditched without affecting either the extra money or higher standards required.

There's a lot being made of children losing confidence if they're told they're in the bottom 20%. How is this going to be a surprise to them? If they can't follow lessons because they can't read, they are already going to feel confused, disorientated, unmotivated, anxious and they're unlikely to be brimming with self confidence.

I do wonder, though, if enough is being done to make the transition process from primary to secondary as easy as it could be. I know the Pupil Premium pays in some instances for Summer schools, but in Scotland, the emphasis is on making the transition as easy and as seamless as possible. There is close working between secondaries and feeder primaries and there's a huge emphasis on preparing the children for the changes. When I went to secondary a million years ago, we were taken to Wick High for a morning and we went for a walk. My daughter had a 3 day transition festival and had met many of her high school teachers when they'd visited her primary.

Have a read of the consultation document here and make sure you make your voice heard.

This is a story about a Liberal Democrat Deputy Prime Minister giving extra money to disadvantaged kids and ensuring that standards in primary schools improve so that those kids are better prepared to enjoy the challenges of secondary school. It's a critical part of enabling everyone to get on in life, which is, for me anyway, the most important part of what Liberal Democrats do.

* Caron Lindsay is Co-Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings